The MariaDB Blog The Official Blog of the MariaDB Project

Tag Archives: MariaDB

The Caryatids on the south porch of the Erechtheion (420 BC), Athens, Greece

I suppose I should probably say “MariaDB στην Ελλάδα” which, according to Google Translate, is Greek for “MariaDB in Greece”. We’re still finalizing the arrangements, but I’m pleased to announce that the next Monty Program-sponsored MariaDB Developer Meeting will be held in (or near) Athens, Greece. Update: See below for hotel/location information.

Monty Program tries to hold two MariaDB Developer Conferences / Monty Program company meetings each year. The most recent one was held in Portugal this past March and it’s past time for another one. Monty Program is a virtual company with employees scattered all around the world, and these meetings give us a chance to both get together with each other and to meet with other MariaDB developers and users.

The conference dates are Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, 11-13 November 2011. Most of us will be arriving on the 10th and leaving on the 15th. We will have an excursion day on Monday the 14th.

If you live in Greece, or would simply like to join us, please do! Nearly all of our conference sessions are open to the public, no registration required (but we would appreciate a heads up, just so we can make sure we have enough seats and power outlets). At past meetings we’ve had people from around the world join us, and we would like to continue that tradition.

As at past meetings, there will be three tracks: one focused on MariaDB development, a community track, and a documentation/infrastructure track. So there should be something of interest for anyone who would like to become involved in making MariaDB (and MySQL) better.

We’re working on the schedule right now. If there’s something you feel we should discuss, or if you are planning on attending let us know!

Update, 8 Nov 2011: I’ve posted the agendas for each day of the conference to the MariaDB Developer Meeting – Athens page of the AskMonty Knowledgebase. Notes from the various sessions will be posted to this category during the conference.

Thanks.

Hotel Information

We’re going to be at the Best Western Hotel Fenix in Glyfada. They’re located 24Km from the Athens International Airport and are a 20 minute drive from the center of Athens (at least, according to their website).

One thing which we, as developers of MariaDB, run into is that our personal database needs are not the same as many of our users. In fact, our needs are quite light compared to many. We have a MariaDB website, a company website, a knowledgebase, this blog, and that’s about it. None of them are particularly high traffic compared to what our customers have. But apart from talking to our customers, which are just a small percentage of the total MariaDB population, we wanted to have a way of finding out how MariaDB is used “in the real world”, so to speak.

Asking lots and lots of people to fill out surveys isn’t any fun, and we would have to keep repeating the survey ad nauseum to get useful information over time on trends and such. So many years ago (around 2003 or 2004), we came up with an idea of implementing a “phone home” feature in MySQL. It had an unfortunate fate — everyone agreed that we needed it, but, apparently, there was never a good time for implementing it. And we — in MySQL — kept on developing the features that we supposed you might want, without the statistics that would help us know what you actually needed.

But we can stop guessing now. Let me announce the User Feedback plugin, it’s included in the just-released MariaDB 5.3.2-beta. This plugin is disabled by default, but we hope many of you will enable it. The statistics gathered will help us determine where to focus our development efforts and we think they will prove beneficial, or at least interesting, to everyone else. (What? You thought we were going to keep all of the information to ourselves?)

The statistics gathered include things like buffer sizes, CPU architecture, OS, kernel version, what plugins are enabled, how much memory is installed, and so on. The statistics are all anonymous and contain no sensitive or private information. The information is collected into the information_schema.feedback table (and if you have the plugin enabled you can see what has been collected with a simple SELECT * FROM information_schema.feedback query). Once enabled, the Feedback plugin will automatically send a report a few minutes after startup and then once a week. Submitting is done via an HTTP POST (just like a web form).

Even if you choose not to submit anonymous statistics to mariadb.org, you may still find the plugin useful, especially if you run many instances of MariaDB. You see, the URL the plugin POSTs to is configurable. The default is to post to mariadb.org, but you can easily change it to POST to your own server, or to your own server and mariadb.org (you can configure multiple URLs).

For paranoid folks out there (and a good DBA should be a little bit paranoid) we have provided many different ways to ensure that the plugin only sends what we say it does — anonymous usage statistics. You can configure multiple report URLs, can see the HTTP traffic with a network sniffer, and can even submit the data manually using a web browser if you so choose.

So, if you’ve ever wanted to help out with MariaDB, but just couldn’t think of anything, here’s something that everyone who runs MariaDB can do without breaking a sweat. Help us help you by enabling the User Feedback plugin!

I just updated to Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric” on one of my desktops and I ran into an issue with MariaDB.

It’s not an issue with MariaDB itself, more in how the MariaDB “Natty” .deb packages are configured. We haven’t released .deb packages for Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric”, but the Natty packages work fine, apart from this one configuration issue (and when we do release “Oneiric” packages, they will work out-of-the-box).

The main problem is that some things have moved around in “Oneiric” and Apparmor doesn’t like the MariaDB “Natty” Apparmor defaults file because it doesn’t account for some of the new destinations. Specifically, /var/run has been moved to /run (a discussion of the rationale behind the move can be found here). Other things have been moved too, but the /var/run to /run move is the one that is causing trouble.

I searched launchpad and found bug #810270 which talks about the move and some of the packages, including MySQL, which needed to be updated. So for the version of MySQL in the official Ubuntu repositories, things are fixed. To fix things on my local machine I took a look at Ubuntu’s MySQL apparmor-profile file and saw four differences between it and my local /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.mysqld file:

After making the above changes everything appears to be OK. Official MariaDB .deb packages for Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric” are coming, but until they arrive, I can at least continue to use the old MariaDB “Natty” packages.

Let me know in the comments if you’ve run into any other issues trying to run, install, or upgrade the MariaDB “Natty” packages on “Oneiric”. Thanks!

P.S. I don’t think I will ever get used to writing “Oneiric”. It’s just such an awkward word. Whatever happened to ‘i’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c’?

**Update 2 Nov 2011** We’ve updated our MariaDB 5.2.9 packages with a fix for the Oneiric upgrade issue (and we have added real Oneiric packages). What we’ve decided to do is remove the apparmor profile we ship with MariaDB. If you’ve customized your profile like above, when you update to the new version (the only change is to the apparmor profile) you will be prompted to keep your existing profile our use our (empty) profile. It is safe to use our empty profile. If you haven’t customized your profile then the update will remove the old apparmor profile.